A bestselling writer lives the inclusive life
I have a bigtime writer’s crush on Ann Patchett. Her 2001 novel, “Bel Canto,” is still among my alltime favorites. But my adoration of Patchett is about more than her writing.
Years ago, when I was running a public author series, Patchett showed up to talk about her engaging essay collection, “This is the Story of A Happy Marriage” (2013), which details the lineage of divorce in her family, including her own at the age of 25, and her eventual marriage to her longtime husband. If you’ve ever heard her speak, you know she oozes charisma and authenticity.
After the event, she sent me a thankyou note. What kind of famous author does that? Mrs. Patchett did a good job on manners and taught her daughter something about humility to boot.
Patchett is also a bookstore owner (Parnassus Books in her hometown Nashville). She cares deeply about independent bookstores and often champions undertheradar new writers.
Her 2016 comment in the Guardian displays her ferocity when it comes to customers who browse her store, then purchase online: “You cannot come in, soak up what we have, talk to the staff, get recommendations, then go home and buy the book on Amazon. If you do, I will hunt you down and smack you around.”
As a brazen indie bookstore advocate myself, that’s music to my ears.
So my pump was primed when I came came across her January essay in Harper’s Magazine, titled “These Precious Days.” She starts off telling us how Tom Hanks came to record the audio version of her latest novel, “The Dutch House” (which I highly recommend). Then the essay becomes about something bigger, mostly the story of an unlikely friendship with Hanks’ assistant Sooki.
That’s where we really get the essence of Patchett, her capacity for compassion, her astoundingly inclusive life, her generous spirit. After reading the article, I indulged the fantasy that Ann Patchett was my BFF. Get a life, Barbara, right?
Of course, Patchett has written about friendship before, notably in the 2004 book “Truth and Beauty: A Friendship,” about her relationship with writer Lucy Grealy (“Autobiography of a Face”), who suffered from disfiguring facial cancer and died of an apparent drug overdose.
In “Bel Canto,” an opera singer is caught up in an attempted coup in an unnamed Latin American country and held for months under house arrest with a group of strangers. Similarly with “Commonwealth,” children from a blended family find themselves sharing a home. “The Dutch House” also deals with a family fallout as well as the outsize significance of a childhood home.
She once explained in an interview that her novels all tell the same story: “A group of people are thrown together and must forge connections to survive.”
Happily for those in her orbit, this goes beyond her books. Ann Patchett is a worldclass forger of connections.
After the event, she sent me a thankyou note. What kind of famous author does that?
Barbara Lane can’t remember a time when she didn’t have her nose in a book. Her column appears every other Tuesday in Datebook. Email: barbara. lane@sfchronicle.com